As someone who uses and appreciates 37signals products, I can honestly say - we like being the kind of people who use and appreciate 37signals products. JA Westenberg.
Tech marketers way undervalue identity as a marketing tactic. It works well, just like in shoes and coffee loyalty.
Stickers. Devrel. Community management. Conference schwag.
We assume that people chose one technology over another based on utility (does it work for what they want), and also price. What we miss is the anchoring that happens before that. What buyers put on the short list to evaluate in PoC’s. They put things they identify with, and some throw-away choices. They then go through a lot of work to build up a case for choosing the tech they want, that they identify with.
There’s exceptions, of course, but I think this identity effect drives the majority of decision making.
It is an extreme taboo for technical people to admit this. They are not supposed to be driven by aesthetics and taste - their decisions should be almost inhuman and provable by logic and testing.
But, ask a developer what language they use, or an ops person what they support, and then ask them why they use that instead of alternatives. Typescript versus Node versus Java. VMware or Linux or Windows. AWS or Azure or Google or Cloudflare. You’ll quickly find out what they identify with, just as, I imagine, you can ask athletic people which brand of tennis shoes they buy.
More or less, all of those things (from shoes to type systems) are equivalent with respect to getting the same outcome. But, the users of those things that identify with them will say, at least act, otherwise. And they will stick with that decision for decades.
As Westenberg lays out, People use the technology that represents who they think they are, who they want to be.